大象传媒

I was born in April 1929 and so was 10 years old at the beginning of world war 2. I took the 11+ (then called "the scholarship", and passed very successfully. I was waiting to go to the Dalston Secondary School (it would now be called a grammar school) when on 3rd September 1939 the announcement came on the "wireless" that we were at war with Nazi Germany. I remember Father saying "Don't worry they will never reach London, we are quite safe", and then the sirens wailed their warning. We were all shocked, and not knowing what to expect, I was literally sick with fear.
Father had refused a shelter, because we didn't have a garden for an Anderson shelter, and the table like shelter for houses without gardens, he felt was unnecessary because of his conviction that nothing would ever reach London.
He insisted we three (Mother, he and I) should sit under the stairs, that being he said the safest place in the house. Fortunately, within minutes the all-clear went, and he boasted how he said said all along that they would never reach London.
The Dalston Secondary did not open for some time, and then opened as the North East London Grammar School. Mother decided

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